I'm a huge fan of Formula 1 racing. I've comment previously about being fascinated by rare talent, and F1 is so knife-edge that it take rare talent to even get into the seat. Multiple-time champions of other racing series have totally failed to even make a good showing in F1, such are the demands on a driver's talents. It's a stunning sport to watch, so much so that right now I'm watching the practice session (Really! Practice!) live from Malaysia. It's mid-afternoon there, and a while past midnight here. I'm a pure sucker for this stuff.
One of the questions in that Shane And Peter interview to which I've referred a few times was on life/work balance. Now, my balance has very recently been thrown totally off.
There were problems, of course, among the three Turtol partners, mostly small but not all of them. None were large enough to be show-stopping, at least in isolation. And, truth be told, I really was a bit surprised by the turn our final pre-breakup conversation took. My intention, when we sat down to talk about our then most-recent management issue was to alter our role/responsibility balance among ourselves, favoring more control by me at Michael's expense. It's certainly possible that I was too harsh in my criticism of Mike, though I believe it was well considered and accurate, if not delicate. And I recall Mike agreeing with me at the time, though he may not actually do so now. I don't know, we haven't discussed it. All our conversations since that one have been about handling his decision to close down the company. I briefly considered trying to continue on without him, just buying him out of it, but Turtol was his idea, his brainchild and largely his baby.
Still, after a time it was my baby too, and the loss still hurts.
What hurts more is that I've never had more fun working with anybody else. It was a stone blast, except those rare times when it wasn't.
One of the several reasons I didn't choose to continue on with Turtol goes back to the whole work/life balance. An initial condition of my getting involved with those guys was that I would only work a couple days a week. I have three young children (10, 9 and 8, at this writing), and I missed much of their young lives while working 100 hours a week on a previous venture. Mike and Libor actually pulled me out of retirement to form Turtol. Not that I resisted too much; I still think it's an excellent model for a company. I had spent about 18 months being a stay-at-home dad, and I was ready for a new challenge. Plus, my youngest was just about to start full-day school (1st grade) when it all came about, so it seemed as good a time as any to get back in the game.
So working a couple days a week and a bit from home was fine. But the 60 to 80 Mike and Libor were putting in, not so much. I'm just not willing to put that kind of time in any more. I LOVE the work we were doing. I got up every day excited to get to it. And that, to me, is a big part of the work/life balance equation. If you hate your work, you'll hate your life. If you love your work, you'll love your life, or at least the odds of loving your life are better. I mean, you could have a really horrible home life and use work as an escape. I've seen that happen, and it ain't pretty. But that doesn't fit my thesis, so let's ignore that for now. As much as I love it, though, I also love having the privilege of staying up to silly hours of the morning to watch $2M machines storm around a far-off racing circuit, using a gallon of dead dinosaur juice every lap in the most thrilling way. Balance, you see, is about enjoying as many aspects of your life as possible. Aside from laundry and some other mundaneness, that's how I try to do things.
The short version, then, is that I'm continuing the technologies and the platform of Turtol, in a new company called TurtolHosting. I'll focus on the platform stuff, and do only very limited development and spec work. And I've resurrected a couple of opportunities which existed at the beginning of Turtol but which we couldn't all agree to pursue. More as soon as I can say more with certainty. And more on the whole "why open source is good" aspect of this, too, in future posts.
